Villagers, of course, retained the usual advantages of country life—fresh air, purer food, and greater bodily freedom and variety in labour. But the inner conditions of life were otherwise much the same. In furniture, even the fairly well-to-do cultivators seldom went beyond a fireplace (usually outside), a grain store, a plank bed, some rags, some brass pots and dishes, and in rare cases a few silver ornaments on the legs and arms of the women as the most convenient bank. All necessary architecture, even in mud hovels, is beautiful, and so are all implements for human use, but I never saw any attempt at decoration or conscious beauty. It would be absurd to call the Indian peasants ignorant, for they understand their own business quite as well as we understand ours, and in their own knowledge they have little to learn. But in most villages the isolation and absence of schools make them unnecessarily superstitious and apprehensive of unreal dangers. Almost within sight of Lahore, the women rushed away to the flat roof-tops with their children for fear I should blight their souls, and the men could not imagine what I might be, except a revenue collector, a pill doctor, or an official come to poison the wells with plague. Near Delhi the women turned their faces sharply to the wall at my shadow, and lived in perpetual terror of “soldiers,” though for no definite reason. At the foot of the Himalaya up from Hardwar, no one in the village had heard of the Viceroy, or of the Congress, or of Lajpat Rai, though it was little more than twenty-four hours’ journey from Lahore. Only one man knew what a newspaper was, or had ever seen one, and neither he nor any one else could have read a word of it. One old man said he knew they were governed by England, but he had no notion what sort of a thing England was. Another old man in a village within ten miles of Delhi told me that, although he knew nothing about England, he was grateful to the English because when he was a boy his grandfather used to tell him of horrible murders and lootings, but there were hardly any of such terrors now. And as that was one of the few nice things I heard about ourselves in India, I will conclude with it. [Illustration: BOMBAY MILL-HANDS. [_Face p. 288._ ]